2) Extend my sincere gratitude to the many customers, MVPs, users, partners and enthusiasts that helped us build what we hope proves to be an exceptional product.Thank you.

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The team (at Microsoft and extended by the community mentioned above) has been hard at work on this for a long time - Beta 1 shipped in December 2006 – and we’re now very close to general availability (GA) when we’ll have the privilege of hearing from customers what they like and what we can make better. The final step in release comes with our November 12 product launch (previously announced), which kicks-off GA.See Eric Watson’s earlier blog entry describing the difference between the RTM and GA milestones.

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Our #1 goal with EBS has always been to increase the satisfaction of our customers in midsize businesses – giving them a better experience and helping them to leverage the full value of their IT investment.We believe we can do that by tailoring our software to their specific needs, practices and preferences. The challenge is to take complicated technologies designed for the enterprise and make them more easily consumed by companies without enterprise-size resources.To succeed in this we knew we’d have to stop talking and start listening.